Shoulder the Sky (19 page)

I was surprised that I didn't feel any satisfaction in this. I wanted so bad to be nasty but this was just kid's stuff. Jake was an easy target. He was Pearl Harbor and I had all the planes. But I couldn't seem to drop the load.

“No more mister nice guy,” was all Jake said to me when I climbed out at school. I didn't thank him for the ride. Lilly grabbed me before I walked away. I thought she was going to yell at me. Instead, she shoved her school schedule in my hand. “You need me, you'll know how to find me,” she said. I walked towards school. It didn't look anything like the same place I'd left yesterday.

After a major fire burns through an old growth forest, after the fire has seemingly run its course and the fire fighters are all home washing the soot out of their clothes and staring at their singed eyelashes in the mirror, sometimes there are roots deep underground still smouldering. All they need is a little oxygen.

I think the other kids could smell something burning in the classroom during my first two periods of the day. Teachers droned and students sat droopy-eyed and uninterested. I stared at the back of Kathy Bringhurst. I liked her hair and that surprised me. I had to admit to myself that I liked the way her hair looked. It was long and brown and kind of straight. It was nothing Hollywood gorgeous, just real girl hair and I liked looking at it.

And I was totally shocked. Shocked because I was one hundred percent sure I hated everything in this world. There was not one thing right about what was
going on in the universe and it was as if everything that happened was some kind of punishment for me.

Except for this. I liked her hair.

The bell rang. I couldn't even tell you what the teacher had been talking about for the last fifty minutes, but the blackboard was full of ambitious words and diagrams. Apparently it had been an English class and Ms. Wallace was talking about a poem by Walt Whitman.

I caught up to her outside class. “Kathy.”

“Martin, I didn't even see you in class.”

“Invisibility runs in my family.”

“I didn't mean it that way.”

“How are you?” I asked.

She had that sadness still about her. Scott Rutledge was still dead. He had not come back to life as she had hoped. Her dreams were shattered. Her heart broken and scattered to the highways headed off in all directions. “I'm doing better,” she said.

“I really like your hair.”

“Thanks. I was thinking of getting it cut.”

“No,” I said. “Please don't.”

She didn't understand, I know. And I'm sure I appeared more the freak than usual. I had discovered one blessed thing in the world I liked — only one thing. And she was considering cutting it off. She studied the weirdness in my face. “Okay. I won't cut it.”

My soul dredged up from the sewers of Hades.

“Maybe I'll trim the split ends.”

“Sure,” I said as if giving permission. “You can do that. Walk you to math?”

Math had been on a major downhill skid ever since the HMMWMT had exhibited dementia during class. Whatever was going on in class was as exciting as last year's lint. The new guy, Mr. Templeton, didn't seem to care. He droned and droned and then gave an overly ambitious homework assignment that no one would be able to finish. I stationed myself in the back of the room so I could stare at the back of Kathy some more but I decided not to talk to her again because whatever was going to come out of my mouth would probably sound fully flaked.

Darrell made first contact with me at lunch. I hadn't seen him all morning and at lunch he wanted to know where I had disappeared to yesterday. The Egg Man had thought to bring an extra sandwich for me in celebration of his own success. I warned him I was feeling a little testy, that if I said anything rude, he should chalk it up to simple psychosis.

“Emerso, I had my way with Microsoft.”

“The challenge of a lifetime, right?”

“You bet. I hacked past all the firewalls and all kinds of stuff only Bill Gates himself could have dreamed up. I was there. I was inside the corp. Adrenalin rush or what? Access to everything. Financials, R&;D, Bill Gates' personal hobby files — some weird shit there. Company memos. Short range, long-term planning, info on corporate spying. You name it.”

“Once again, hearty congratulations. And then you got arrested?”

“No. I was tricked.” But Darrell was still smiling. “I was suckered in and it was beautiful.”

“I don't get it.”

“Hackers' heaven. I thought I'd busted down the doors just like I'd always dreamed, but it was a virtual space — a virtual version of Microsoft. I was lured right in like a skunk headed for some smelly mackerel in a Havaheart trap. It was all fake, perfectly and convincingly so.”

“How did you figure that out?”

“I didn't. I back out of the whole shebang, I cover my tracks, I bask in the glory of it all, and then I get this e-mail marked urgent. They offered me a job.”

Deep down, Darrell was still the eight-year-old nerd who had long ago been my best friend when we used to perform smelly experiments or put obnoxious concoctions on the road for cars to run over. He had more to tell but I was annoyed that he thought this so important.
Little boy games. I took a bite out of the sandwich he had brought. Classic Darrell egg salad with paprika. I added that to my list of things I didn't hate about the world. So far it was a small list of two items.

“Why did they offer you a job?”

“Only a handful of hackers — five to be exact — have ever gotten that far into Microsoft. The virtual site was set up to deceive hackers into thinking they we were in. But it was set up so that only the best of the best could succeed. And if you are that good, they want you on their team. Or at least they want your brain.”

“Did you tell them it was a package deal, they can't have your brain without your body attached?”

“We haven't gotten that far with our negotiations. But it's looking like great things are ahead.
Salut.
”

We bumped egg salad sandwiches.

(New heading) Self-Definition

We are memory; we are emotions. We are each worth about ninety-seven cents if reduced to our basic chemicals. It used to be sixty-two cents but the price of everything has gone up. If we dwell on our own insignificance then I suppose everything could seem pretty pointless but I'm not about to tell you that here. We all come into the world more or less the same. And the end of everyone's story is the pretty much the same.

We are not much more than bugs smashed on the windshield of life — don't think that is profound or anything because I'm borrowing from that Mark Knopfler song.

You think you have problems, I think I have problems. But take a scoop of any history and you'll discover that it mostly comes up turds. If my memory serves me well (and it does), I could tell you that Galveston,Texas had a hurricane in 1900 and six thousand people drowned.

That was the same year Sigmund Freud published his book
Interpretation of Dreams.
Extrapolate that on your Texas Instrument. The next year Queen Victoria died, which may be seen by some as a blessing — not so much because of her but what she represented. She had no choice in who she was because of the blood she was born with. In her name, the English terrorized anyone who was not English — barbarism in the name of civilization, that sort of thing. (An old sad song, a wailing.)

President McKinley was assassinated that year and later someone named a mountain in Alaska after him. (Alaska had been bought at a kind of yard sale of real estate from the Russians for spare change in 1867.) McKinley's assassin, Leon Colugos, had Russian blood in him and he claimed to be an anarchist — a guy who doesn't believe in anything organized. In reality, he was not much different from the American soldiers or the British riflemen who all agreed it was okay to kill a person who represented something you didn't approve of. Nobody named a mountain after Colugos, not even the Society of American Anarchists who had a hard time agreeing on anything except that no government is good government.

This history lesson is not in vain, however. I just want to point out that we are gum on a shoe, you and I as individuals. If you don't think this is important, go watch a rerun of
Beverly Hills 90210,
or better yet, read Dostoyevsky's
The Idiot.
Boy, that would cheer you up.

So I'm on a rant. Enjoy it or bug out of the zone. Where was I? Up to 1902. You get gramophone recordings of people like Enrico Caruso who sang opera. A bunch of silly little wars, tribal battles, nothing global to really get your gobs into. Just infighting, small civil wars, attempts at revolution, mudslides on villages, viruses, smallpox, religious persecution, and so forth. Your average year.

1903 is kind of interesting, though, because Wilbur and Orville (fine names for cartoon characters) Wright put themselves aloft on a machine from those sand dunes down at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Technology would continue to improve and commercial airlines would one day flush the contents of their toilets outside while flying over your town and people would wonder about these odd little summer showers. 1903 was also the year Henry Ford started his company and a million or so people down though the years would have incredibly boring jobs working on assembly lines. Those assembly lines switched over from Model A's to tanks and other military vehicles when the big wars heated up a few years later.

The Russians and the Japanese were killing each other over who owned Korea in 1904. The Russians went nuts in 1905 and there was lots of blood in the streets, people trampled by horses, mutiny on the
Potemkin
like in that old black and white film they showed you in school, baby carriages rolling down steps while soldiers shot weapons. Screaming mothers. And so forth.

San Francisco had an earthquake in 1906 followed by a fire that pretty well burned the city down, but only 500 people died, not like in 1908 when an earthquake in southern Italy killed 150,000. (Notice I skipped 1907 where the usual run of bad luck happened but memory fails me except to note there was a “financial panic” where only a handful of rich cats lost fur and jumped to their deaths from buildings. It wasn't quite the human freefall of 1929 but a kind of dry run, so to speak.)

I'm going to try to end this decade on an upbeat note and remind you that Robert Peary made it to the North Pole in 1909 and discovered to everyone's amazement that it was cold and that there was no Santa Claus. And in 1910 the Boy Scouts of America was incorporated and nearly a century later, Boy Scouts would still be asking their mothers to sew “Personal Hygiene” merit badges onto their uniforms.

That's my random decade. My hope is that it cheers you up somewhat in thinking that your own little moans and groans (you didn't get the Play Station for Christmas,
your investment in HDTV didn't double your money, your dreams of becoming a skeletal fashion model were crushed by the girth of your thighs — etc., etc.) don't amount to a hill of beans in this world, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, who probably didn't even realize that smoking was bad for his health at that point in his life and so he could actually enjoy a cigarette without guilt.

If you are still with me, you realize that a kind of grey pall hangs over the Emerso.com site today. It's an attempt to weed out the mere passersby on this potholed information highway, to discourage those who are not totally loyal to the cause — the mere hitchhikers and hangabouts. In an effort to streamline and serve our target audience, we want to weed out anyone who is not hard-core.

And for those hard-core, hard-ass fans still with me (and I know you are there even though I will never, ever answer fan mail), I should leave you with brief reports about what happened right after the North Pole and Boy Scouts. Once again, there was the usual run of bloodbaths, head-lopping, and death by fungus on all continents. Also, in 1911, aircraft were first used as a military weapons in the Turkish-Italian War, which you may not have ever heard of unless you were a Turk or an Italian. A lot of people died in China bringing about a revolution that ended the Manchu dynasty, but then Chinese emperors were not exactly legendary for their kindness to peasants and blood was just waiting to be spilled. Mexico had a revolution. Fires in factories were big
that year (I almost said “hot”), a notable one being at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York where 145 workers were killed.A few were Italian immigrants who had survived the earthquake of 1908.

After that, it's pretty much a gruesome road leading to WWI. It starts off with a whole lot of cruelty and suffering that takes place in small wars involving Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia,Turkey, and Romania. This is 1912 I'm talking about, quite the year for tragedy if you toss into the mix the
Titanic
sinking and fifteen hundred drowning because they didn't have enough lifeboats. But you knew about that one because you saw the movie, and the upside is that near the tail-end of the century investors in the movie would make scads and scads of money. Yahoo.